Why is spaghetti longer than my pot is wide?

October 4, 2022 2:19 PM

This is not a question of worldly importance, but it's something I've pondered for a while and haven't come up with a satisfying answer to, not even a guess. Every cooking pot I've ever owned, except an aggressively oversized one, has had a diameter smaller than the length of the spaghetti that I purchase.

Do I snap the spaghetti in half, or do I let it dangle half-in, half-out until the end softens up and I can fit the rest of the spaghetti into the water? Well, I still don't know. Why isn't there "pot-sized spaghetti"? And how did we arrive at this as the standard length for spaghetti?

posted by LSK to Food & Drink (36 answers total)

A taller pot solves that problem. I think the width is constrained by the size of burners on our stoves.

Sidenote: A taller pot also gives you more water to cook with which will improve your pasta through the magic of optimizing the thermal transfer rate
posted by muddylemon at 2:24 PM on October 4, 2022 [7 favorites]

It's supposed to be long enough to twirl around a fork, so I think most people don't break it in half.
posted by pinochiette at 2:25 PM on October 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

By 'optimizing thermal transfer' i mean - the greater mass of water can hold more heat energy and transfer it faster to the pasta which means the center will cook before the outside gets mushy and sticky
posted by muddylemon at 2:26 PM on October 4, 2022 [7 favorites]

What I was taught to do, is you grasp the sheaf of dry noodles and sort of slowly stir the boiling water with it-- as it softens, you can push it down further, until you can at last release it to swim freee in the boiling turmoil
posted by The otter lady at 2:26 PM on October 4, 2022 [51 favorites]

of all the questions

what muddylemon said makes sense to me.. you just stand the pasta up in your pot and then gently ease it in as the hot water softens the immersed part.. I imagine that keeps pots within a reasonable diameter for the average stovetop, and you do want a length of spaghetti to slurp up so don't go snapping that beautiful stuff like an animal

edit to add: the otter lady's stirring method is sheer genius
posted by elkevelvet at 2:26 PM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was raised in a home that broke spaghetti and other long pasta, but I now recognize that as heresy against my Italian forefathers. I now cook the pasta unbroken and it takes only a minute or two for it to soften to comfortably fit in my pasta pot.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 2:30 PM on October 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

This is a fun question, I hope my response isn't overly obnoxious. Plus, I am the animal who breaks their ramen in the package before spilling it in the bowl and adding water so to hell with that observation
posted by elkevelvet at 2:31 PM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

I don't have a real answer for how standard pasta lengths came to be, but my grandma used to dry her pasta draped over the back of the kitchen chairs. I imagine you want to hit a sweet spot of few enough pieces to fit on the available chairs but have the pieces be not so long that they stretch themselves out.

To the cooking: You're letting so-called logic get in the way of good cooking. First of all, when eating your spaghetti, can you tell which end went into the water first? No, you can't. So it doesn't matter. You stick the sheaf of pasta into the water and when it has softened sufficiently it will slide down in there. All will be well.

Second, these super tall pots satisfy the overlogicked engineers among us but are a dumb way to cook. They waste water, energy, and time, and the volume of water is too great to ever get nice and starchy. Cook your pasta in a normal pot. The water will get starchy and then you can use some of it to thin your sauce and make the whole thing come together.
posted by HotToddy at 2:46 PM on October 4, 2022 [23 favorites]

I'm using a large spoon to drive the spaghetti in the boiling water, pushing them down/sideways slowly until they are soft enough to fit.
posted by elgilito at 2:46 PM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Pot-size spaghetti is actually a thing. I’ve bought it from a local grocery store. The noodles are half the size of “standard” ones, so they don’t have to be broken apart to fit in a pot.
posted by Roger Pittman at 2:51 PM on October 4, 2022 [10 favorites]

There are a number of different answers to this. I was brought up with The otter lady's approach and I still go with it. But...

Back in the day, the main thing was to have a very large amount of water to pasta. This was (I think) because it took ages to get the water to boil over old time coal or gas burners and you wanted it to keep the temperature after adding the pasta. So the idea was to get a huge pot of salted water to boil, throw in the pasta, and only wait a minute for it to get back to the boil. Those huge pots could easily fit the pasta.

When I grew up, gas burners were more efficient, and also people were more reluctant to take out the big pot, so The otter lady's method became the norm, but still you would use a lot of water to pasta.

Today, with induction burners, loss of heat is not so much of a problem, but even before that, people were experimenting with cooking pasta in wide but shallow sauter pans, with less water but more width.
This works very well, but you have to stir the pasta a lot more than in a big pot to prevent it from sticking. For a number of recipes, it has the advantage of making a lovely starchy pasta water, that can be used in the sauce.

It took me a while to get used to this modern method, but now I usually use about a liter of salted water for each 100 grams of pasta. I start out stirring it with a fork till it is all soft and submerged in the water, and then boil it following instructions on the package. Mostly, I finish cooking it in the sauce (sometimes with added pasta-cooking water), so I drain it one or two minutes before the time recommended on the package.
posted by mumimor at 2:51 PM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

I do the “break in half” thing. Seems to work fine and no one complains.
posted by bookmammal at 2:55 PM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

I've always just stood the spaghetti up in the pot, giving it a little push occasionally until it softens enough to settle into the water. When I was a kid here in the UK in the 70s, the spaghetti that was available was a lot longer than it is now. I forget which brand we used - it came in a blue packet. Even then we didn't break it up.
posted by pipeski at 3:08 PM on October 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

Yeah, I’ve never understood why breaking it in half is such a problem.
posted by kevinbelt at 3:34 PM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Iconic video about breaking spaghetti
posted by lamp at 4:24 PM on October 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

I use a microwave for my pasta mostly. I bought this pasta box which is long enough for spaghetti unbroken, because I was tired of needing a whole pot of water for cooking just enough pasta for two people. It works very well after experimenting to get the timing right.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 4:33 PM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

i know exactly what you are talking about, and this annoys me every time i make spaghetti. all of these tips are absolutely doable things, but i hate doing them! i want to just drop the spaghetti in the pot! rachael ray makes an oval pasta pot for this purpose - but i don't have room for it in my tiny kitchen. a girl can dream though! one day. https://www.amazon.com/Rachael-Ray-80090-Professional-Anodized/dp/B091F94NKT/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=oval+pasta+pot&qid=1664927409&qu=eyJxc2MiOiI0LjMxIiwicXNhIjoiMy43NyIsInFzcCI6IjIuOTMifQ%3D%3D&sr=8-3
posted by monster_a at 4:51 PM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

A taller pot also gives you more water to cook with

Which is completely unnecessary, and even undesirable if you need starchy pasta water for the sauce. You're also wasting a lot of time and energy heating a large volume of water to a boil (a temp that's also unnecessary, by the way) and then pouring it down the sink.

Yeah, I’ve never understood why breaking it in half is such a problem.

If I buy spaghetti or fettuccine it's because I want long pasta and I want to eat it the way it's traditionally served, not cut up on my plate like I'm two years old. If I want short pasta, I just buy short pasta.
posted by some little punk in a rocket at 5:26 PM on October 4, 2022 [17 favorites]

Long thin pasta dried into "nests" doesn’t need breaking or a huge pot but is far less efficient to package and also easier to break while handling.
posted by clew at 5:37 PM on October 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

Oh, another pasta history puzzle: AIUI we’re pretty sure pasta was originally popular because it reduces the amount of fuel needed to cook. (Much of the Mediterranean, for instance, was terribly fuel-poor for a lot of the last two millennia.) The giant boiling pot of water is very unlikely in those circs. Restaurant efficiency? Literally palatial cooking normalized?
posted by clew at 5:42 PM on October 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

I have seen people cook it in an oblong Le Creuset type pot to solve the length problem.

But yeah, I just kind of push it down into the pot as it softens. Never takes more than 30 seconds or so.
posted by bondcliff at 5:54 PM on October 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

I just drop it in the pot. My pot is wide enough that the length is fine. It's not an unusual pot - it's an eight-quart All Clad pot. You don't have to fill it up all the way. It seems odd to me that you're using a small pot to cook spaghetti in.
posted by metonym at 6:28 PM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Serious Eats has suggested that you can cook pasta in a very small amount of water, which is what I do. I make no claim to particular pasta skills but it seems to cook just fine and of course the starchy water is starchier for sauces.

I cook my spaghetti in an 11.5" diameter shallow saucepan and just ease it in as it softens.
posted by Frowner at 7:19 PM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

I have only two pots able to fully accommodate 25 cm standard pasta and fit within the burner footprint. Both are 9" tall and 6" wide, giving them an ~11" diagonal, and both were designed as clam steamers.

But even they would need to be filled to within 1/2" of the top, which is not really practicable.
posted by jamjam at 7:28 PM on October 4, 2022

But I do have a 24" fish poacher which could hold even the original 50 cm pasta if stretched diagonally across two burners on top of the stove — during walleye off season, of course.
posted by jamjam at 7:41 PM on October 4, 2022

Response by poster: I worry I phrased the question wrong. I am curious about the history of spaghetti, and asked the question about what to do with spaghetti for rhetorical reasons but it came off as the main question. I appreciate the responses, but still wonder why spaghetti is the length that it is.
posted by LSK at 8:12 PM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Demaco might know. Looks like they’ve been making pasta machines since before modern supermarket layouts.
posted by clew at 9:01 PM on October 4, 2022

Best answer: I cannot find a definitive answer but there is some useful info in this paper on pasta standardisation for South African markets which says it's approx 25cm for pasta length as a current industry norm, with variance of up to 1.6mm each way, and the uniform pasta length matters to consumers and is also due to packaging standardisation. Quality control in the factory involves removing any too short/long pasta, so breakages are during handling to the supermarket.

Elsewhere, other papers refer to a historical shortening of pasta in the 20th century as it became a commercial product from the then-norm of 50cm for homemade pasta.

I think it's quite safe to say a 50cm long box of pasta would experience much more breakage than the current 25cm.

The other factor is the drying - there's a nice diagram in the PDF of the industrial drying 'curtain' and different ways to hasten the drying process without harming the pasta's taste or shelf-life. Whatever your length is, it's split by the curtain, so the current industrial machines must be set to make 50cm noodles then split in half. At home, you could make a much longer noodle, but to dry it would require a very tall drying curtain, and you don't want the pasta to overlap, so shorter lengths = better drying.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 9:05 PM on October 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

do I let it dangle half-in, half-out until the end softens up and I can fit the rest of the spaghetti into the water?

Yes, this. As the Kenji article linked above mentions, the less water you use, the better your result will be thanks to increased starch concentration.

Historically I think you also have your answer: folks used larger pots with more water that would get starchier as more and more pasta was cooked in it.
posted by supercres at 9:18 PM on October 4, 2022

Pasta has to dry uniformly, not too quickly (or it becomes brittle), not too slowly (or it might spoil).

The easiest way to achieve this with pre-industrial technology is to space it out on drying racks in a draughty environment.

A shorter length of fine, light, stringy substance will be proportionally more imbalanced if it's hung slightly off-centre, and thus more likely to fall from the rack in stray gusts.

The minimum optimal length for hanging is thus more important than the optimal length for pot-insertion, which can be mitigated by the various techniques detailed above.

The present-day maintenance of this minimum length, and the strength of feeling about breaking-in-half as a mitigation strategy, can both be explained by the importance of la tradizione.
posted by protorp at 1:11 AM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

If you hold your bundle of spaghetti vertically over the water with two hands - one hand high and one low - then give each end of the bundle a little twist in opposite directions just before you drop it in - you can get the spaghetti to fall neatly into a kind of splayed-out fan around the circumference of the pot. As the pasta softens, it all slips down into the water of its own accord.

I learned that by watching Jamie Oliver do it on TV. I can pull it off about 50% of the time, but it’s very satisfying when it works.
posted by rd45 at 1:51 AM on October 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

I get the water boiling in the big pot, then hold a hank of long dry spaghetti in one hand. Slide the spaghetti into the water at an angle and slowly let it go while dropping it around the edge in a circle, so that it doesn't remain in one thick clump. It does not need to make a complete circle. No art, just functional splaying.
A stir or three should resettle the pasta into the water and keep the strands apart.
Short spaghetti strands fall off the fork. No twirl, no fun.

Now getting the lasagna into the pot -- that I do break in half and add to the water a piece at a time to keep it separated.
posted by TrishaU at 6:15 AM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Per Barilla's website on it's 'blue box' spaghetti, this would seem to be a common curiosity:

Spaghetti originated in Naples and got their name from Antonio Viviani in 1842, as they looked like small pieces of string, from the Italian word "spago". Originally they measured 50cm in length however due to time and space related needs, they have been shortened until they reached their current length of 25cm. Nowadays Barilla Spaghetti No 5 is synonymous with Italian cuisine everywhere; their sinuous and elegant shape is irresistible, as is the charm of rolling them around your fork.


So, the answer is that the seemingly long 25cm is already a compromise, and it's understood you'll have to stand there for a minute as it softens. Which was probably seen as a non-issue, given the amount of time everything else took before kitchen appliances.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:14 AM on October 5, 2022

Funny, I am staying at my parents apt and just last night made pasta with a pot that is exactly as wide as the pasta! I had to tell my wife about it I was so excited. Not sure the brand, I can guarantee it is high quality brand and at least 20 years old.
posted by silsurf at 11:33 AM on October 5, 2022

I always wondered why both Revere and Farberware chose to make their big electric frying pans 10” (25.4 cm) in diameter. Renas were like 12-13”, and also had a fluid filled base which ensured perfectly uniform heat even up the sides and at high temps, but the base also had a spring-loaded vent and I was afraid of possible fumes, so I very reluctantly got rid of mine. These days I think you could accomplish the same thing much better with a sealed base filled by a very low melting alloy and have an electric frying pan for the ages — which is probably exactly why no one has made one.
posted by jamjam at 12:34 PM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

When you buy rice noodles, they are often about 2X the length of spaghetti noodles, but bent over in the middle. Something like this or this. sometimes they are even longer and bent/folded a few times, like this.

Point is, a package about as long as the typical package of spaghetti seems to be about as long a package as the market (grocery stores?) want to deal with. Cutting all the noodle to that length seems to be one way to get there and folding longer noodles to fit into that size package is another way.
posted by flug at 2:15 PM on October 5, 2022